Or maybe every house needs a Cone of Silence like in Get Smart.
I recently threw up a hackaday for my development cyberdeck and am sifting through all the stuff from over the years to finally get this to market. With the new CloudFlare AI workers, a whole bunch of the infra I used to have to maintain is a moot point so I'm looking to really hit it hard in Q1 2024.
"Virtual Walls: Protecting Digital Privacy in Pervasive Environments"
A long time ago I had an idea after leaving DEFCON about making a standard gizmo, something like a lapel pin that connects via whatever to whatever supercomputer someone is carying in their pocket and that thing presents an obvious color code. Lets say 4 quadrants with a circle in the middle. I think ideally it would be like epaper with maybe a backlight option. Non intrusive but could be vivid. This could let people know in polite society if they did not want to be recorded, were recording, how they were recording, etc. Obviously this doesn't stop anyone from doing whatever, but you can monitor signals from people and if someone is doing something they say they aren't that can be shared. You can also transmit information like PGP public keys via ultrasonic handshake or whatever.
I mean, day to day I could see never needing it but going into the office, taking the train, going to court, going to a concert, there are a lot of ways something like that could be very useful and if adopted at any sort of scale could error check and blacklist bad actors.
Might want to finetune that pitch. What is this thing and why would I want it?
The real pitch is working towards seamless natural user interface for streaming composite spatial data. The easiest thing to explain that people will get is architectural pre-visualization. You've got plans and lot lines, input plans, it generates a structure, that's a known solution, easy peasy. That is layered over GIS data from whatever source. Construction is underway, I can do drone surveying and flightpath automation to do photogrammatry or NeRF or whatever to build and overlay the model from the scan. Simulations are easy for erosion, or looking at the light at different times of year. I can drop ship you a 3D printed architectural model or some sort of widget. If you point your phone at that widget, you can interact directly with the information. Standard AR fare, you can go onsite and see the AR stuff. Builders can take scans of things in production and combine them. Yadda yadda. I have a company that is selling basically that. But to get to there, what I'm after is real time streaming composites with effortless and inexpensive mcguffens.
Composing things for a real time stream to be delivered for people to look at needs to have sort of LOD fallback. Streaming compressed point clouds that can be altered in real time, cameras that can be controlled or tabbed through, pulling video from multiple sources and muxing all of that into a cohesive digital product attached to a physical / inexpensive medium that a person can interact with. To build these things I've also had a focus on audio reactivity. Composition based on the sounds produced in the real world and in the digital world. Say 20 people have the same mcguffin, they can all fiddle with parts in place on their desktop as an AR or VR experience, or they can just open up a browser and mess with the world like a traditional video game. Or there can be a stream of 4k to Youtube or Twitch or whatever and that can be synced up to augment.
This is a long term study on what I don't like about modern computing and what I want to see. The stuff that makes money is high throughput distributed GPU compute and GIS mapping. These days people also want LLMs in everything so I've got the stack to produce that and it pays the bills.
The parts are really starting to fall into place though and I expect I'll have my "killer demo" by the end of the year. The problem is with this really is that I can't point to something and say "it's like that" because it doesn't exist and no one else is trying to do anything similar as far as I can tell.
Anyway, thanks for looking!